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If you don't have it download the first episode of The Walking Dead for free through 12/31! Starting on December 28, the remaining 4 episodes will be on sale for 200 MS points each! If you do it this way, it'll only cost you $10 total. That's a hell of a steal considering each episode is originally $5 each! It's a great game! Just ask Bogues!

“The Wii U is an infant that’s just been born,” Hayashi tells us. “It’s a little unfair to compare it to mature platforms that people have been working on for over five years. I’m sure people will find ways to bring out even more power as the platform matures.

“If you’re basing this simply on processor speed, then it’s not next generation,” he says. “If you’re basing this on Wii U being a new idea that challenges existing platforms, then it definitely is next generation. It is a console videogame platform that is now independent of the TV. Nobody has done that before.

I hate to tell him the bad news, but a console independent of a TV is a mobile gaming machine, which has been done. Sony has the mobile Playstation (now the PS Vita),nintendo has the Gameboy, and then there's the Smartphones.

It's a new generation because enough time has passed since the last generation.

It's pretty ballsy to talk about "innovation" and then not say anything about what they actually did (compared to the Wii CPU). We know that it is a tri-core chip, we think we know that the clockspeed is 1.25 GHz or thereabouts, and they have some eDRAM in there (similar to the X360 GPU), but beyond that, it's a black box.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

If you don't have it download the first episode of The Walking Dead for free through 12/31! Starting on December 28, the remaining 4 episodes will be on sale for 200 MS points each! If you do it this way, it'll only cost you $10 total. That's a hell of a steal considering each episode is originally $5 each! It's a great game! Just ask Bogues!

I just finished this game last night. (I bought the Mac version on Steam during the xmas sale.)

The Good: The story rocks. The characters rock. The voice acting rocks. The visual design rocks. The choices you have to make are sometimes gut-wrenching; I often felt bad after making a choice. The final episode is really sticking with me, as the choices I made and the resolution of the grand mystery really hit home. I didn't cry, but lots of people online say the final episode made them cry, and I believe it.

The Bad: The point-and-click puzzle mechanics are kinda annoying and unpolished. For instance, walking around looking for clues and objects is fine until you hit the edge of the environment, then your character will do a frozen, ghostly glide until you hit another environment edge; it looks terrible. The conversation trees are fine, but sometimes the game will repeat conversation, or worse, will let you start a conversation although all the options have already been exhausted, so the game will trigger the pre-discussion animation, then nothing will happen, then the game will revert to exploring; it's really bizarre and immersion-breaking. Also, I had to turn of the character shadows (which didn't hurt the visuals, believe it or not), because they look terrible in up-close conversations even though they were completely fine at a distance.

The Ugly: The interface controls are terrible. I think they did an alright job squeezing gun-fighting into a point-and-click adventure game, but the mouse pointer lag was just ruining it. I can safely say, every single time I died, it's because of the damn pointer lag. There are also silly quick-time events where you pound the Q key for an ungodly amount of time. Oh, and you can't customize the controls, which is really terrible for a left-handed, laptop user like myself. For instance, you can use either WASD or the cursor keys, but even using the cursor keys I still have to use Q and E for quick-time events, and the game kept telling me stuff like "press S to back away!" instead of recognizing I was using the cursor keys, not WASD. Worse, you have to use the mouse scroll for important actions, which is an utter nightmare on a laptop trackpad.

Overall, I recommend playing this game, because it's a really satisfactory experience, but be ready for a lot of annoying tics. It might be much more natural on a game console.

I know that there have been discussions about that before, but in effect, a console competes with what else is on the market. The Wii competed with the PS3 and the X360, thus they're the same generation.

Besides, looking at the clockspeed of the main CPU is not very useful. What would be interesting would be to look at the sophistication of the GPU, and with that base, I think the generation-discussion would stop rather abruptly. The PS3 doesn't even have unified shaders (it uses what is essentially a Geforce 7900-series chip with a nerfed memory bus) and the X360 uses what can be be described as a prerelease unified shader arch. Even if the Wii had used something like a Radeon 4000/Geforce 200 series, it would be of a newer generation than those. Rumors have it we're looking at something like a Radeon 6770 with an eDRAM cache - certainly newer than the current-gen competition.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

I know that there have been discussions about that before, but in effect, a console competes with what else is on the market. The Wii competed with the PS3 and the X360, thus they're the same generation.

That's very practical, but given the ever broadening range of technology available at a given time I'm not sure that works anymore. Much like...

Originally Posted by P

Besides, looking at the clockspeed of the main CPU is not very useful. What would be interesting would be to look at the sophistication of the GPU, and with that base, I think the generation-discussion would stop rather abruptly. The PS3 doesn't even have unified shaders (it uses what is essentially a Geforce 7900-series chip with a nerfed memory bus) and the X360 uses what can be be described as a prerelease unified shader arch. Even if the Wii had used something like a Radeon 4000/Geforce 200 series, it would be of a newer generation than those. Rumors have it we're looking at something like a Radeon 6770 with an eDRAM cache - certainly newer than the current-gen competition.

Since the PS2 era, we haven't been measuring consoles by straight-up CPU (N64 was the last. Was the PS2 technically 128-bit? I don't know). Thankfully, we can still measure overall performance (which is why a lot of people hilariously point-out that this era isn't rightfully HD), and can show there's a bit of difference between the Wii and "HD Twins".

If the Wii U ends up being closer to the "HD Twins" than whatever MS & Sony release this year (?) in terms of performance, it's going to be last-gen in all but title.

On Tuesday, the country’s largest video game retailer cut its fiscal fourth quarter 2012 sales estimates to between 4 and 7 percent down rather than a slight increase. As of this writing, GameStop's stock has taken a near 7 percent hit in one day, falling to $23.12 per share. GameStop’s sales during the nine-week holiday period ending December 29, 2012 fell by 4.6 percent when compared to the same period in 2011.

Analysts also noted that the company saw a 16 percent drop in used-game sales, which has traditionally been a solid moneymaker for the company.

I won't gloat just yet since we've got two consoles potentially launching at the end of the year.

Forza Horizon : So as you complete races, you get points towards a new bracelet (with a new colour) which in turn opens up more races.

I had completed the first level, spent money tuning my car, done a few challenges against other drivers while cruising around. All good fun. Last night I started the next level of races. And the fun factor went down rapidly.

I had to buy cars to drive in the races. Why? Why can't I use my car (downgraded if necessary) to drive in these races? Why allow me to tune my car if I can only ever use the fully tuned car on the road and not in races? Why, no matter what, do I start in last place, even if I have a good record? Why no matter what difficulty setting I choose, does everyone else accelerate away much faster than I do when starting a race?

Quite frustrating, I may slap in NFS again.

I just popped in Forza Horizon as I just finished Halo 4 and NFS: Most Wanted. The game is nothing short of beautiful! As I pumped in about 3 hours of gameplay, I felt the same frustrations as you. I had to pay to downgrade my car so I could enter a rally race! WTF?! Who ever heard of such a concept? Other than that I've fallen in love. Definitely worth the $15 I paid on Microsoft's website during the holiday season!

I just popped in Forza Horizon as I just finished Halo 4 and NFS: Most Wanted. The game is nothing short of beautiful! As I pumped in about 3 hours of gameplay, I felt the same frustrations as you. I had to pay to downgrade my car so I could enter a rally race! WTF?! Who ever heard of such a concept? Other than that I've fallen in love. Definitely worth the $15 I paid on Microsoft's website during the holiday season!

Yeah it is beautiful, and in fact once you win a few races and buy a few cars, my complaints are less valid. Save up a bit, get the Lambo, and see what top speed you can get on the motorway. Then tune it, not auto tune and see what top speed you can get. I had 2 Lambos and the auto tuned one was less powerful than my (limited) personal tuning efforts.

Let me know what you think about not having to worry about cops. To me it was such a relief after NFS.

Not the best post, but I haven't been able to locate a link to my liking. Any thoughts on Oculus Rift? I'm a motion control hater, but I'm open to something like Oculus which would incredibly add to immersion. Of course, they need to make it comfortable, but as a Virtual Boy owner, I'd still be open to playing with it sometimes.

---

Second, I believe it's been a while; I seem to recall someone claiming they'd be able to figure out to IW-Activision settlement size later on down the road. Any word on that?

Ethernet, USB, E-SATA, HDMI, Display Port, optical audio and 3.5mm jacks. If you've got stuff to plug into it and fill all 20 ports, it's going to be really pretty under the TV .

I wonder how much it weighs? I know how hard it is to make a 7-port USB hub stay in one spot on your desk - or even flat on it. Too light, and the Piston thingy is going to moving around all on its own. Fitting, in a way.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

"We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that (developers) want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" explained Hirai.

"So it's a kind of--I wouldn't say a double-edged sword--but it's hard to program for," Hirai continued, "and a lot of people see the negatives of it, but if you flip that around, it means the hardware has a lot more to offer."

That's not the reason (and yes, I realize that you probably figured that out...). The PS1 was trivial to program for, because Sony was the underdog, and needed to attract developers. After that. the PS2 and PS3 were difficult because Sony was on top with the previous generation, and it was in their interest that the games made for their platform not be easy to port to other platforms. Now Sony is down in the pack again (I think the PS3 eventually overtook the 360 in worldwide lifetime sales, but if so, it was barely, and it's nowhere near the Wii), so the PS4 will be easy to program for again.

Anyway, Feral's upcoming games radar has been updated (about a month ago), and two of the teasers have been identified to Lego Lord of the Rings - to absolutely no surprise - and XCOM: Enemy Unknown - which will mean that it will get a quite late Mac port. Better late than never...

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

Don't care about MMOs. Didn't care about WoW despite playing way too much WC2, didn't care about TOR despite liking KOTOR, won't care about this. Bethesda should get moving on that Fallout 4 instead, there are leaks enough about it.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

Item #1 - Relic - Developer of the Company of Heroes titles and Warhammer 40k titles, includes all assets for Company of Heroes but NOT Warhammer 40k
Winning bidder: SEGA
Winning bid: $26.6 million
Back-up bidder: Zenimax Media
Back-up bid: $26.3 million

In going further into the documents, there is not one mention of the fate for the Warhammer 40k license or the WWE license. SEGA did not pick up the Warhammer 40k license when they acquired Relic, leaving the assumption that the licenses will revert back to the license holder, in these cases Games Workshop and WWE Inc.

Crytek bought the rights to Homefront for a half million dollars. What a steal! I actually liked Homefront and Crytek did a superb job with the Far Cry series.